Soundless Roar introduces a distinctive new voice to Holocaust literature. Ava Kadishson Schieber, author, poet, and artist, spent her teenage years hiding from the Nazis on a Serbian farm. Her cultured speech and city-bred body language could have betrayed her, so she was forced into near isolation. Schieber began drawing while in hiding, and she continues to express herself today with the same urgency. The drawings and writings in Soundless Roar are the culmination of many years of artistry. In her work, she shares her memories of loved ones killed in the Holocaust: they are "friendly ghosts" that will always be a part of her.

Schieber's drawings, paintings, poetry, and prose are all intimate reflections of one another. Her experience forged the unusual sense of time that shapes Schieber's stories. In her preface, Phyllis Lassner writes: "The timetable of Ava's stories often consists of circles within circles, of patterns of an intertwined past, the past present of hiding, and the present looking back at those distinctly separate but inseparable pasts."

AVA KADISHSON SCHIEBER was born in a town near Belgrade. Her mother had converted to Judaism although her father had changed his name in order to receive a commission in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. Schieber grew up in Novi Sad and then the family moved to Belgrade in 1940 where they prospered until the Nazis invaded Belgrade in 1941. Schieber went into hiding with relatives of her sister's fiance, who was Serbian. She lived with them on an isolated farmland for four years, after which she was reunited with her mother. Her father and sister did not survive the war, but Schieber later moved with her mother to Israel. She has been living in Chicago for the past twenty years.

"Not since Primo Levi has so much light been cast on the darkest recesses of the human heart. This astonishing book is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit."
--Barbara Rogan, author of Rowing in Eden